The Specialized guys mentioned this in the aero podcast — referring to sprinters — but I didn’t really understand the concept, e.g. being kJ restricted. This article made it very clear and something I never thought about — training power at different time intervals:
- The ability to be dynamic under fatigue was also important. I didn’t do a good job of quantifying this one, but one sentiment was clear – many of our athletes had the peak power values to be competitive in the top 10, but they lacked the fatigue resistance to access power over threshold past 2500 kJ. This was a key area to work, top-end power, but after 2500 kJ of work.
I heard about this a million years ago in regards to Italian races. That most cyclist could match the numbers of the pros — when totally fresh. The key was to able to do it after 4-5 hours of riding. Like the Italian races of old, where they would ride around for 4 hours and then totally drill it all out for the last hour.
I’ve never consciously done this but it makes total sense. Will have to start doing more of it after my A race.
(Like doing Pendleton and then a bunch of VO2 intervals. 
)
Also interesting was that coach and rider were most likely not doing 80/20 training. Perhaps in the very early winter months, Nov-Feb had ~20hr/wk but then moved on. You can’t be in a polarized plan when your “bread and butter” are Tempo/Z3 workouts:
“…a series of short, hard accelerations straight into a block of steady tempo…a workout we were able to do frequently and at high volumes all throughout the winter.”
Looking at the Pinot numbers from his first couple of years as amateur/pro, he most likely was doing polarized, which makes me think if this might be more of a baked-in Euro mentality vs. “New World”? 